


Show Me Where My Armor Ends

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 09:36:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16385498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: They do their best to make their peace unpeaceful. They squabble like hens, clucking and scratching, pecking at one another for little reason. She’s never known someone so adept with a jab or a jape, capable of mixing fondness and scorn so seamlessly. At first it had angered her beyond all measure. She rose to his bait every time, until she was red-faced and impotent with fury at his gall, his temerity. She’d been treated as a queen for too long, it occurs to her now; she’d known how to deal with worship, with love, with anger and opposition, with criticism, even hatred. What she hadn’t known was how to be teased.





	Show Me Where My Armor Ends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RoseAlenko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseAlenko/gifts).



> For [@mhysaofdragons](https://tmblr.co/me0ia9AS76vMZnm5qiSWLmA) and [@unburntdaenerys](https://tmblr.co/mwatL2eqEhMGnx9HVpLTbiA), based on [this post](http://mhysaofdragons.tumblr.com/post/179300877620/so-tonight-i-dreamed-about-jaimerys-it-was-only-a).

They make an unlikely pair.

The world is not what it was when they met. Wars have been waged and won, enemies both mortal and fantastic are vanquished. Friends, family, lovers, opponents…so many are gone from her, lost or dead or only distant. For the first time in her life, Daenerys has had neither cause nor quest, no grudge to nurture, no throne to seek, no danger to either pursue or flee. It’s a world that’s plainer than what she once expected – a world that’s softer, quieter, duller, emptier – in a way that’s both comforting and unnerving, and Jaime seems to understand as no one else could.

Perhaps what allows her to love him, and he to love her, is that they both know so little of what to do with peace.

They do their best to make their peace unpeaceful. They squabble like hens, clucking and scratching, pecking at one another for little reason. She’s never known someone so adept with a jab or a jape, capable of mixing fondness and scorn so seamlessly. At first it had angered her beyond all measure. She rose to his bait every time, until she was red-faced and impotent with fury at his gall, his temerity. She’d been treated as a queen for too long, it occurs to her now; she’d known how to deal with worship, with love, with anger and opposition, with criticism, even hatred. What she hadn’t known was how to be teased.

The day she snapped and threatened to feed him to her dragons, he’d laughed at her with no malice, his smile brighter than the sun. It still makes her stomach flutter to remember it. Before that, she’d resented the way she desired him. After, she only desired.

Then, when she’d dared to touch him and discovered he wanted to touch her back, then she’d taken and given and received.

“Did you tease your sister as you do me?” she’d once asked as they lay abed, unsure what answer she hoped to hear. He tensed beneath her, his heart like a kettledrum under her cheek. Just an hour ago it had beat like that because he was inside her, thrumming a wild tattoo under her palm as she rode him like she once rode her Silver at a hard gallop.

(It was nothing like the way she rode Drogon; nothing ever could be)

He was quiet a long moment. It was a topic he rarely breached, and Daenerys was too mindful of seeming prurient to ask. Even in her own family, incest wasn’t the subject of many conversations.

“No,” he answered at length. “I didn’t do anything with her the way I do with you.” Her heart had burned with the truth of it, with the pain of all they both went through to arrive here together, far from every person and place either of them had ever loved, but not alone for the first time in a very long time. 

It’s an adjustment to live as anyone else would. Here they have no servants, no cooks or maids. It is what Dany wanted, a land without Kings or Queens, but there are times she would take back a Queen – any Queen, it wouldn’t even have to be herself – to have someone draw a hot bath for her.

“Give those to me,” Jaime says when he finds her struggling with buckets full of hot water, her bath less than halfway full and already starting to cool. “The water will have evaporated by the time you get there.” He transfers one bucket to his bad arm, catching it in his elbow before taking the other two from her. She trails mulishly after him with the last bucket, annoyed at how easily he lifts them when it had been all she could do to keep upright.

“I could have done it,” she says, leaning against the door frame and watching as he fills the bath. His back is broad, muscles clear even under the cloth of his tunic. His face in profile could have been carved from marble and set on an altar to worship. It’s always startling to her to remember how very handsome he is.

He turns to face her, a grin on that handsome face, water splashed from the buckets molding his tunic to his chest. 

“Don’t see how,” he chuckles, “when you’re barely bigger than the buckets.”

Dany raises her chin, adopting her haughtiest air, one that served her well as a Queen. “I think you’ll find I’m much taller when you’re on your knees,” she says. Another man might take it as a reminder of who she was, who she still is, no matter her lack of throne or crown. Another man might, but not Jaime.

His laughter disappears as he drops to the floor. For all that he loves to tease and laugh with her, his lovemaking is serious, nearly anguished in its intensity at times. As he shoulders her legs apart and sets his mouth between them with a relieved groan, Dany is the one laughing. “You’ll just have to draw me another bath,” she says, but something tells her neither of them minds. For all that he teases her, he’s yet to refuse anything she’s asked.

Tomorrow, she thinks in a haze as her crisis begins to take her, tomorrow she’ll ask him to paint their front door red.

 

*  
_title from "Pluto," Atlas: Year One, by Sleeping At Last_


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